Ep 52 | Google’s Hidden Dictatorship | Dr. Robert Epstein | The Glenn Beck Podcast

On today's podcast, I want to talk to you about the Matrix.

I want to talk to you about things that I don't think most Americans even understand, and the time to understand it and do something about it is running very short.

Dr.

Robert Epstein is a guy who you're going to meet today who is a leading expert on what's happening with Google and what is happening in the world of AI.

And this conversation should terrify you, but it will also leave you with the question of, okay, so what do we do about it?

What are you going to do?

March, protest, Google.

For most Americans, I mean, that's the way we think we change things, but that's not it.

This involves fighting a corrupt and powerful system, one that is now bled right into Washington, D.C.

It has to be flawless and it has to be smart, and it has to happen right now.

So, anyone who stands up against Google has an element of hero inside of them.

Today's guest is, I think, a very brave man.

He is a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.

He's not a conservative.

In his own words, he has been left of center his whole life.

He voted for and supported Bill and Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton, the last time in 2016.

He loves America and he feels and felt that everyone on both sides would be interested in his studies.

Unfortunately, that is not the case.

Too many people are trying to tear him apart.

He fears for his life, for what he is looking into, but he will not sit down.

But he warns, now is the time.

Speak now, or you will forever be forced to hold your peace.

Earlier this summer, he spoke in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee to present the research that he has uncovered that proves that leading up to the 2016 election, Google manipulated the search results and news stories with systematic bias in favor of Hillary Clinton.

He believes that they could throw the election away from one candidate or the other.

It would be away from Donald Trump.

He believes this may not be an honest election, and we must have proof that this is or is not.

His list of honors and accommodations is impressive.

He is charming, he is clever, he is insightful, and he is brave, as you will see.

Today, Dr.

Robert Epstein.

You're not doing any of your research for political purposes.

In fact, you voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016

and would have reported on it if it was the other way around.

It didn't matter to you, right?

I would put it differently.

I would say that I put put democracy and our country and the free and fair election, I put that ahead of any particular party or candidate.

I believe that the average person is like that.

I believe the average American

just wants it to be fair, wants it to be true,

and

stop all these games.

But we seem to be sliding into a place to where it's become so tribal that you're either for us or against us.

And when I say us, I mean that tribe and that tribe, whichever side,

is the right one and the other one is evil and going to get us all enslaved.

That's part of the problem.

The tribes have always existed.

I'm sure you know that Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, they were vehemently opposed to having a two-party system.

Jefferson

was quite funny, actually, in some of the ways he criticized such a system, but they thought it would lead to strife, and it has led to strife.

And so we're reliving that now.

But

there's another factor that's part of the mix that has never existed before, and that is tech and the internet and social media.

It's making things happen much faster.

So wait, can I back up though?

Sure.

I think tech has added the critical element before you add speed.

It's added fear because it's changing our society so much.

It's changing how we relate to each other.

It's changing people's jobs.

You don't know what's right over the horizon.

You know, you don't know who you can trust, what to trust.

And so it's added

fear, tribalism plus fear.

Now you add speed to it.

Right.

And you have complete chaos.

But there's another side to what's happening in tech.

It's a hidden side.

That's what I've been studying in my research now for almost seven years.

That's where it gets scary.

Now you could say, well, hey, it's scary enough what's on the surface.

That is true.

It is kind of scary.

But the hidden part of tech is much, much scarier.

And the hidden part is?

Well, there are a couple things.

Number one,

this is easy for people to understand.

The other thing that's a little harder, but I'll start with the easy one.

The first thing is censorship.

You know, that's a scary word that we remember maybe from the days of the Soviet Union or something.

Except with tech, what that means is

they're showing you news feeds.

They're showing you answers to your questions.

They're showing you search results.

They're showing you all kinds of things constantly.

And

they have control over what you see and what you don't see.

And it turns out that they exercise that control in ways that serve the company or the company's values or the company's politics.

And we don't know what we don't know.

I said to Ray Kurzweil, you're a friend of Ray's, and I said to Ray Kurzweil,

maybe 12 years ago, Ray, let's just think this through.

If Google has all the information about me and knows and can predict what I'm thinking, then as a competitor of Google, I could go, you know what, I could make this better.

And Google will already know that I'm there.

Why would they supply me with the information to help destroy them?

And his answer was, oh, we'd never do that.

Yes, that's right.

That's for sure.

But it turns out that

they actually

do exercise the powers that they have.

Now, the censorship power is one power.

They exercise that power.

Facebook exercises that power.

Twitter exercises that power.

On Twitter, it's called shadow banning.

It means you're Ann Coulter, let's say, who I know and I consider a friend.

And Ann has millions of followers, and she sends out a tweet, and she doesn't get much response, and she begins to think, hey, maybe

my tweet isn't reaching all of my followers.

And in fact, we know from leaks from Twitter that, in fact, that is the case, that Twitter...

in fact, throttles information.

They throttle messaging.

So all of this is censorship of one sort or another, and it's censorship you can't see.

You can see if YouTube, which is part of Google,

shuts down some conservative channel, which they just did again, apparently yesterday.

You can see something like that.

But most of the censorship that these companies engage in, completely invisible.

Now, that's just one scary thing.

But the most scary thing is the manipulation.

These companies have the ability ability to manipulate us and our kids in ways that have never existed before in human history.

And I've been saying this for years and years because I've been showing the power of manipulation that these companies have through controlled experiments.

I've been saying this for a long time.

Just lately, just lately,

whistleblowers have come forward, documents have been leaked, which confirm what I've been saying since 2013.

You and I have talked off the air briefly about Bernays, the father of propaganda.

I think he was the cousin or the nephew of Freud.

Freud, that's fair.

And

was really the first guy to really master, at least in the common era, propaganda and sway people.

He's the reason we have bacon and eggs for breakfast.

And everybody thinks, oh, no, that's always been that way.

No, no, not until Bernays.

We had the average meal was a cup of coffee and a piece of toast for Americans.

And

you have been,

your study includes that whole arc.

Hitler said the reason why he lost World War I is because we had Bernays.

World War II, a copy of Bernays' book, was on Goebbels' desk when they finally entered it.

He learned the lesson.

What

Hitler wanted to do mechanically at the time could not have been done.

All of these things now can be done.

And

in some cases, you say they are being done.

So,

and at really rapid speed.

So, how much time do we have before a door is closed and you're in a cage?

I think the door has closed.

I think we're in the cage

now.

You know, there's control and there's control.

There's control like a stoplight that you can see, right?

And then there's other kinds of controls that you can't see, but can still impact

which way you're going to turn.

And there's a wonderful quote that comes from a book called The Hidden Persuaders published back in the 1950s, which is more or less as follows, an unseen dictatorship is possible

still using the trappings of democracy.

Is this the difference between 1984 and Brave New World?

No, this goes beyond both of those visions.

This is pretty shocking to say.

Well, sure, because in a dark way?

Goes beyond in a dark way?

In one sense, in a very dark way, because

we're talking about techniques that have simply never existed before, ever, in human history, that are made possible by new tech.

and made possible because a lot of the tech is controlled by monopolies.

That was never part of the plan.

That wasn't part of

the concept that

the originators of the Internet had in mind.

No one envisioned...

It's supposed to be the opposite.

Yeah, the Internet was supposed to be the great leveler.

There weren't supposed to be these massive entities, Google being the largest,

that could control so much of what happens on the Internet.

So there's a very dark side here in the sense that these new methods of controlling people are in the hands of a very small number of people.

And those methods are being used.

And we don't know it.

Well, I know it, at least.

When people are banned on the internet,

I just want to shake people and say, oh, how is the book burning today?

In Germany, when they burned the books, everyone knew what that looked like.

They knew what it was.

Now, when they just disappear, when you're shadow banned, when you're silenced, when you're depersoned, there's no rally, there's no uniform, there's no bright light in the sky,

there's nothing to say to you,

this looks wrong.

You can so easily just move on and not even notice.

But aren't we doing the same thing without knowing it?

Let me explain one technique, for example.

This will scare the pants off you.

Okay.

I don't know, you're coming to a profession.

June 2016, a small news service released a video, and they posted it on YouTube, by the way.

And they were claiming that

Google made it very easy to get

when you started to type in a search term related to, let's say,

Donald Trump or a lot of other people,

they would flash suggestions at you.

So those are suggestions.

You haven't even seen search results yet.

They'd flash suggestions at you of all sorts, including negative ones.

But according to this news report, if you typed in anything related to Hillary Clinton, you couldn't get anything negative.

And I thought, well, why would they do that?

Why would they do that?

Things like that bother me as a scientist.

Nudges you.

Ah, it's more than a nudge.

It turns out it's it's it's something amazing.

What they're doing is amazing.

So first of all, with my staff, we started checking this out to see if this was true.

So we would type in Hillary Clinton is on Yahoo and Bing, and we'd get a long list of very negative search suggestions.

Hillary Clinton is the devil, Hillary Clinton is sick, etc.

And it turns out that's what people were actually searching for.

That's what Bing and Yahoo were showing you in their suggestions.

We type Hillary Clinton is on Google, and we got Hillary Clinton is awesome.

Hillary Clinton is winning.

And that's all.

Okay, so again, the question is, why would they do that?

Why would they show you things, first of all, that no one is searching for?

And why?

Can I attempt an answer and see how far off I am?

Yeah.

I always thought years ago, I always thought that that's what people were actually searching for.

And so I feel like I'm out of touch.

Oh, gosh, everybody thinks she's this.

And so I feel,

you know, I feel separate, which I don't want to feel separate, but I feel separate and apart like, oh, everybody believes this.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Is that anywhere close to why they're doing it?

Maybe at one point.

Oh, it's worse than that.

Yes, yes, it is.

It is actually worse than that.

In fact, I think when those suggestions were first started, I think it was just

for convenience, to help you.

I think it was nothing more than that.

And then it turned into

auto-fill, exactly.

And then it turned into something else and it turned into something else.

And what it's morphed into now

is something really, really scary.

Because I ended up conducting a long series of controlled experiments on search suggestions, autocomplete, it's called.

And

I'm pretty sure based on the experiments that Google is manipulating people's searches from the very first character they type into the search box.

Now if you kind of doubt that then I suggest that you pull out your phone and you type the letter A into the Google search box

because there's a pretty good chance that you're going to see Amazon either in the first position, second or third, or maybe all three.

Why is Google trying to send you to Amazon?

Well, it turns out Amazon is Google's largest advertiser.

And it turns out that Google sends more traffic to Amazon than any other traffic source.

These are business partners and Google wants you to go there.

But the experiments also showed that just by manipulating search suggestions, I could turn a 50-50 split among undecided voters into a 90-10 split.

Wait, from the drop-down box or from the results?

No, no, just

with those

typing it in?

Well, because those suggestions, it's very likely people are going to click on one of those suggestions.

And here's the key to it.

The key to it is this,

that if you allow a negative to come onto that list, then this process which social scientists call negativity bias kicks in.

It's also called the cockroach in the salad phenomenon.

You've got this big beautiful salad, there's a little cockroach in the middle, and all of your attention is drawn to the cockroach.

And you won't eat the salad.

If they allow even one negative to come into that list, negativity bias occurs and that negative suggestion draws 10 to 15 times as many clicks as neutral or positive items.

So if they allow a negative to come in there, they know it's going to draw a lot of clicks.

That's going to generate certain kinds of search results.

It's going to bring you to all kinds of negative information about that candidate or whatever, that guitar,

whatever it is you've typed in.

One of the simplest ways for Google to support a candidate is to suppress negative search suggestions for that candidate, but to allow negatives negatives to occur for the other candidates.

It's interesting.

Donald Trump kicked off his re-election over the summer, and he was doing these massive rallies.

And

I was going to do a monologue the next day about how

the difference, Donald Trump and Barack Obama had the same kind of momentum.

on their first election.

They both had these big stadiums.

Obama was the first one to ever do that and really see that.

Now Donald Trump is doing it and same kind of passionate crowd.

However, when Obama started to run a second time, I remember clearly his stadiums were half to a quarter full

and 75% of it was empty and they quickly had to change.

But I remember those images clearly.

So I clicked on to find images of Donald Trump's rally and then I tried to find pictures of Barack Obama in 2012 running for re-election in stadiums.

I spent two hours.

I couldn't find it.

I gave it to one of my researchers who's a whiz on the internet.

It took him from 8 o'clock at night till 3 in the morning to find it.

And the only reason why he kept looking was because I know they exist.

I know they exist.

What?

How would you possibly explain that?

Just they just disappeared?

Well, if you'd asked me this question a couple months ago, I could have speculated, but now I can actually tell you.

Because a lot of documents have recently been leaked from Google.

And the main thing I say when people ask me about them is, I told you so.

Because I've been telling people for years about blacklists at the company.

And it turns out the documents support every single thing I've been saying.

And

among these documents, there are reports, memos, a manual explaining how within Google we can re-rank,

derank, and fringe rank.

In other words, Google has developed tools for taking information that they don't want people to see,

and they can easily suppress it or boost it.

So, in other words, whatever the normal process is, there's a lot of manual intervention.

Now, I'm going to tell you now, I'm telling you, I guess, on the record, that I have now been approached by a potential whistleblower.

So, I'm not going to give much detail here, but I have been approached by someone.

This is within the past week.

Good.

And

this person is confirming what these documents say, confirming that there is an enormous amount of manual intervention occurring at Google.

Is this a manual...

There's three schools of thought.

One, they wrote algorithms, and that's just the way the algorithms were written, and it's human bias gone into the algorithm, but not an ill intent.

It just is they see the world a different way.

Two, they're sitting around and they are conspiring.

And they're all in on it.

The third one I think is the most realistic, and that is, yes, there's inherent bias because if a bunch of conservatives wrote it, you just see the world differently.

And so there's that inherent bias.

But there are also those who are like, you know what?

And that's not up all the chain of command or anything else.

That's just there's a lot of humans involved in that.

So which is it?

Is it a group of people people that are sitting around having meetings, passing memos, saying do this?

Or is it a small group of people?

Well, as an old psychology professor of mine used to say, if you can imagine it, it's probably true.

So in this case, it would be all of the above.

We're seeing more and more evidence that

Google's algorithms are inherently biased.

And there's a lot of research showing that when someone programs an algorithm, his or her biases get written in.

That shouldn't surprise anyone.

And there's also probably some people at the top who have certain values and certain agendas, and they want those expressed in their products and services.

And

there are also individuals,

just employees, who have

either the password authority or who have the hacking skills to just make magic happen.

The most famous case at Google is a programmer named Marius Milner.

And when a few years ago, someone like me, a professor like me,

found out that Google's street view vehicles were driving up and down the streets of more than 30 countries for four years,

not only taking pictures of our houses, but also sucking up all of our Wi-Fi data.

Incredible.

When this happened, Google blamed the entire operation on one employee, Marius Milner.

And of course, what happened to Marius Milner?

He's on the streets now, right, with a can in his hand.

No, he's a hero at Google.

He still works there.

And on LinkedIn, he lists his profession as hacker.

So

all of the above,

and this is, this is...

When you think of the fact that this company can impact the thinking and behavior and purchases and attitudes and beliefs and votes of more than two and a half billion people around the world, and

all of those kinds of manipulations can be made.

The algorithm itself

can

cause people's views to change.

I'm writing a fiction book and

I need a Manchurian candidate.

I need somebody to go and do something.

If I have all of their information and I control the way they see that information,

can't I find a fairly unstable individual?

Let's say I need a Reichstag fire,

can't I find easily individuals, just keep funneling them without any fingerprints at all,

and pretty much have them execute what I want them to execute?

Well, as it happens, a senior software engineer at Google, whose name is Shumit Baluja,

He wrote a novel

that was all about Google, except it was a fictional version of Google

called The Silicon Jungle.

You'll probably recognize that title because he was basing it on an early 1900s book, magnificent book called The Jungle about Chicago in those days.

But the Silicon Jungle is about a fictional version of Google in which all kinds of really bad things happen.

Sometimes it's because some outside agency comes in and targets an employee and says to that employee, hey, can you help us with this?

And the next thing you know,

terrorist groups in the Mid East, in the Middle East, now have a list of 5,000 potential recruits for their efforts.

And all that information is coming out of Google's data.

So the answer is, not only is that possible, but but here is someone who's been with Google a very, very long time actually telling you in fictional form,

you know, this is reality.

So I read something about Amazon that really disturbed me.

That Amazon does not see themselves in the future as a sales company.

You know this?

They're a shipping company.

And

that's how they want to be viewed in the future.

That's their goal.

But to become a shipping company, they have to be able to

predict you at least 95% correct every time.

So instead of going to Amazon and saying, oh, geez, we need milk, we need this.

And, you know,

I really like those pants I saw the other day.

All those things would arrive at your doorstep.

And you would then just go, oh, wow, okay, wow, I was thinking about this.

I was thinking about this.

I was thinking about that.

That's great.

I don't know about that one.

I'll send that one back.

As long as they don't have more than 5% returns,

that's their legitimate stated goal

to do that.

Now, if

how much are they giving,

getting from me?

And how much are they saying, hey, have you seen these pants?

Have you seen this?

You want one of these.

These are great.

It's kind of like when you're looking for a car, all of a sudden, you start to see all these, you're looking for a white car, all of a sudden, you notice all these cars are white.

I mean, that is normal.

This is possibly not normal.

It would be

juiced for you.

What happened?

Where

A

accurate in reality?

Oh, quite accurate, yes.

Okay.

B,

where is free will how do we know what we're doing and how do we know when we're being controlled or not well there's there's free will in the sense that that that the the the illusion of free will is maintained because you're making the choice I want this I don't want that so the illusion of free will that's important but in fact there is no more free will because what's happening behind the scenes and this is not just at Amazon this is at Google and Facebook as well what's happening behind the scenes is they're building digital models of you.

And Google has been pretty open about this.

I mean, they want to be able to predict your needs and wants before you're even aware of them.

I mean, Google has been investing in DNA repositories for a long time.

And our DNA information has been incorporated into our profiles because that way they can predict what diseases you're susceptible to.

And they also know, by the way, which fathers are not the real fathers.

So, yeah, that's a big part of that hidden world: the digital modeling.

And, you know, if you're a techie, then it's just fascinating.

But if you're someone who's interested in concepts like human autonomy and free speech and free will,

this is the end.

This is the end.

And I'm saying we're in some sense.

Well, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

No, I know.

I just want you to.

I can't tell you.

I read a lot of futurist.

I've been a fan of Ray Kurzweil's for 30 years.

And

I've been saying this for so long, and it has seemed like science fiction to everybody.

And I keep saying, as you must feel the same way, guys, no, it's, no, look at the what.

We are close.

We're close.

And

now for people to start to just be going now wait a minute it's like when did this happen to us oh i don't know ten years ago ten years ago

so i'm sorry i'm frustrated but when you say i want you to repeat you said free will this is the end explain that

if if you're an average American adult

google has has the equivalent of about,

it's hard to even say this because people don't, okay.

Google has the equivalent of about

three million pages of information about you.

They know

much more about you than you know about yourself.

And they're using that information not just to make sure that their vendors can sell you products.

They're using that information

to build a digital you

so that they can predict your needs and wants and behavior moment to moment in time, every single day.

Because they know they can monetize that, number one, but number two, they know more than that.

They know they can use that to create a better human kind.

Okay, so how could I possibly say something that absurd?

Well, because one of the things that leaked from Google about a year and a half ago is an eight-minute video called The Selfish Ledger.

It was meant for internal use only.

I recommend strongly that everyone find this online

and watch it because this is about the possibility of Google using its information and its tools to re-engineer humanity.

And it even mentions

according to company values.

Oh, dear God.

I made a transcript of this video and I'm happy to post that online for people to look at because it makes

what website.

I'll get it to your people and we'll put it up.

But you know, when you

realize the kind of thinking that's going on in a place like this where they have this much information and this much power to control what people see and don't see and then all these new manipulative tools they know they understand the power that they have and

they are openly i mean within within the those closed doors they're openly talking about ways spectacular ways that they can use these powers that they have powers that no

uh dictator in in history has ever had.

And by the way.

We'd all be speaking German if Hitler had this power.

Well,

but this is beyond Hitler because this is almost crazy stuff.

Now, for example,

I'm saying something.

Well, for example, I have,

and my family doesn't approve, but I have some friends who are conservatives, for example.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

Maybe you'll be one of them.

Who knows?

And my conservative friends are just

laser focused on the fact that companies like Google want to make sure Trump is not re-elected.

And that's it.

They're just focused.

And they see Google as some bunch of crazy liberals, you know, left-wing, communist types.

And that's all they can see.

Some of my conservative friends.

And I try to explain to them, no, no, no, no, you don't understand.

The problem is much bigger than that.

If you look at how Google functions in different countries, because they're in every country in the world except China and North Korea, if you look at how they function in different countries, they're not necessarily acting like a bunch of liberals.

And there are countries in which they promote the right and suppress the left.

They go country by country doing whatever they feel like doing, doing whatever serves the needs of the company, serves their financial needs.

Google had plans that

were squashed by their own employees and

by members of Congress to go back into China.

In fact, they would have been there by now or they would have been there early next year at the latest in a project called Dragonfly, working side by side with the Chinese government to help round people up.

To control the Chinese population.

Yeah.

Okay, so let me go to China here for a second on that.

Social credit scores.

Now,

it's hard to know how people really feel about it because they're all in China and you don't dare speak out against it.

But

you'll hear these interviews with people who are absolutely controlled every minute.

China has so much control in many of their big cities.

that they can actually

cause you to never leave your house.

They don't need to lock your door.

They don't need to post a guard.

You will never leave your house because you're unwelcome everywhere.

And they're proud of that.

But you talk to people, the average person, they're like, this is great.

We don't have any crime anymore.

We don't have this.

We don't have that.

We kind of have the same thing going on here in America.

People love the fact that Amazon could

predict me so much that they're going to have exactly what I want.

They love this.

My life is easy.

So how do you fight against

that?

Look, every single day I have to remind my own children, I have five wonderful children,

please stop using Gmail.

Please stop using Chrome, which is Google's browser.

Please stop using Google products.

Please don't get Android phones.

Android is also part of Google.

I was at my son's.

I don't let them have iPads.

We monitor what they're doing.

We don't have Chrome.

I go to his high school.

And they are so excited to announce that they are soon going to all be a Google class.

And I thought, you're handing the life of my child over to Google.

You're giving them everything.

That's right.

That's right.

Well, educational institutions will get all of the entire suite of Google services for free.

So a lot of major universities, even UCLA, even Columbia University,

of course they're going to take those services.

So what's going on here?

What's going on here is that these companies are providing certain kinds of services for free, quote unquote, it's not really free because you pay for it with your freedom.

But they are giving you services which are sort of free and they work really well and they're a lot of fun to use.

And what people and

what's it and they're convenient.

They're sure as heck convenient because if you have to do use some alternative,

that might actually cost you a few bucks or every time I do something, people always call, I use DuckDuckGo.

Have you tried DuckDuckGo?

It sucks.

Right.

You know what I mean?

So I get the convenience part.

What people don't realize is these are surveillance tools.

You're voluntarily

using a surveillance tool.

And the surveillance tools are not just the ones you're kind of aware of.

Something like Gmail, for example, is pretty kind of obvious.

Chrome sees everything you do online and reports it.

Android phones, even when you're offline, they're still recording everything you do and everywhere you go.

And the moment you go back back online, all that information is uploaded.

But the surveillance goes beyond

that.

Stop there for a second.

Sure.

I've got nothing to hide.

I'm not doing anything wrong.

So why do I care?

Yeah, I've had that conversation.

Well, first of all,

everyone has things to hide.

So

you can tell me when we're off the air.

Give me a sample.

But the nothing to hide idea, that just doesn't work because you've got to keep in mind that they're building a digital model of you.

And that digital model not only lets them sell things to you, but lets them control you.

The more they know about you, the easier it is for them.

to flip your thinking one way or the other any way they choose.

I know this because this is what I do in my experiments.

So nothing to hide

is irrelevant.

You do not want a private company, which is not accountable to the public, our public or any other public around the world, to have that kind of power over you and all of your children.

And children are far more susceptible to these manipulations than adults are.

Do you really want to give that kind of power to a private company?

This is so overwhelming for the average person.

Before we get into what can be done,

I remember,

I remember almost 30 years ago now, I said, there's going to come a time when you're not going to believe your eyes.

Digital manipulation will be so good that you will not believe your eyes.

And

six years ago, we started talking about deep fakes and I've been tracking them online for the audience.

Here it is.

Here it is.

I'm telling you, this is not about Nicholas Cage.

This is going to get spooky very soon.

A year ago, two years ago, I said 2020 is the year.

All hell is going to break loose.

What's coming with digital fakes?

With deep fakes.

Well, 2020 is the year.

year.

So you called that because

next year,

especially in connection with the election, it's not just fake news we have to worry about.

It's fake everything.

And fake videos next year are going to be so good

that you're going to have you literally will have

whoever the Democratic candidate is will will you know will give a speech, and then there's going to be, for every true word that that candidate spoke, there might be 100 videos in which the words are changed.

Or the same could be done with Donald Trump.

You're just not going to know what's real and what isn't real.

Now, the solution, quote unquote, that some of the tech companies are talking about

is to do more of what they're doing now, which is suppressing content that they think is defective in some way and and boosting content that they think is okay.

That's extremely dangerous in and of itself because

who are they?

And that, again, makes them official censors,

or as one of these documents from Google says,

it makes us, no, it makes us the good censors.

We're the good censors.

But I don't want them to have that power.

I don't even want a government to have that power.

I don't want anyone to have that power over me and my kids.

But 2020 is the year.

There is going to be an incredible amount of fake stuff out there all around us, no matter what the government or any company tries to do.

Are you concerned at all?

My fear was the first one, if it's big enough, powerful enough, the first one that really breaks through will be War of the Worlds.

I mean, we are, I'm a big fan of Orson Welles.

I studied that time period.

How could he move the people to where a good portion thought that was real?

Well, when you understand the time period and new technology and everything else, yeah, it makes sense.

We're there again.

And that first deep fake that's real and hits the right nerve will be the Orson Welles War of the Worlds down the road.

But it's going to happen so fast that it could cause

it could cause war.

it could cause civil unrest, anything.

Are you confident that

somehow or another we're going to be able to filter those out?

Or do you think that that's realistic to happen?

Okay, I don't think we're going to be able to filter those out very well.

I think there will always be, from starting next year and beyond forever, there'll be more and more chaos around all kinds of fake content of all sorts.

You know, there'll be avatars that are indistinguishable from people, and there'll be AIs that are indistinguishable from people, and so on.

That's just part of the future.

Believe it or not, even though that chaos is coming, that doesn't worry me that much because that kind of chaos is competitive.

and visible.

In other words, at least you can see the fake video and someone could post post another fake video with different words.

To me, it's like billboards.

You put up your billboard over here.

I put up my billboard over here.

In my mind.

And

eventually we go, well, neither one of you are really probably all right.

And you start to think for yourself.

Well, maybe.

But the point is,

at least you're up against

sources of influence, types of influence that you can see and where there is competition.

So what I'm much more concerned about are these

other kinds of influence, these creepy kinds of influence that you can't see

and

where there is no possibility of competition.

In other words, one way to put it is this.

Content in a sense, and a video is content, an ad is content, okay?

A billboard is content.

In a way, content doesn't really matter anymore.

What matters is who does the filtering of content and who does the ordering of content.

In other words, who decides what content we can see or not see and who decides the order in which we are presented the content.

Now, when you get to filtering and ordering, you're back to Google, number one, to a lesser extent Facebook, and to a much lesser extent, Twitter.

And you're back where we started, which is we've got some really dangerous companies with all kinds of power that they should not have.

So I know you are trying to set up a monitoring system and you need $50 million.

So if anybody is watching this, you happen to have $50 million.

Here's where you should write your check.

But average people are helping you as well.

And for a $50 million project to happen, you need somebody with deep pockets right now to be able to hit 2020

and to monitor this election and to be able to prove,

yes, this was fair or this was corrupt.

First question, can the average person help?

Can you start things with $10 million?

Obviously,

any funds we have that we can throw at this problem, we're going to

we're going to do it, of course.

But this time around, I've built two monitoring systems already, and this time around I want to do it on a very large scale and in a way that

has

just

enormous credibility,

that's unimpeachable, to use the language that's common in the news these days, that's unimpeachable.

And that means having a very large group of, we call them field agents in all 50 states, thousands of them.

And we want to be looking over their shoulders with their permissions and we want to be tracking bias in news feeds, email suppression, shadow banning, biased search results, search suggestions, and a dozen other things which I won't mention.

But we want to be tracking this stuff in real time, analyzing it in real time, so that we can report

manipulations, we can report irregularities as they are occurring.

now the best result of that would be that these companies back off and we actually end up with a true

free and fair election if they back off i will have done my job if they don't back off i think the repercussions will will will will take these companies down i think the i think that we'll get serious if if these companies continue this nonsense after being exposed over and over again

with a very, very, very large, highly credible system of monitoring.

If they don't back down,

I think we are going to see fines that go through the roof and we're going to see actual penalties and probably criminal prosecutions.

So let me rephrase the question that I asked Ray Kurzweil.

Let's say I was going to build a system to monitor Google, Ray,

and you knew what I was doing, and you knew the people, because you have information on everyone, you know the people who I am monitoring.

What would stop Google from just not

just making sure those people's algorithms are clean?

Well, that's why when we built these systems in the past, we had to do what the Nielsen company has been doing since 1950.

You know, Nielsen recruits families to monitor people's television watching.

And it's very, very important that the identities of those families not be known because imagine if they were known, imagine the pressure on those families to watch this show and not that show.

I mean, the Nielsen ratings determine advertising rates, they determine whether a show is taken off the air.

So they do things quite secretly.

And that's what we did in 2016 and 2018.

In 2020,

much of what we do will be done in secret.

How many people do you think

think you're overly dramatic or paranoid?

Well, as Alan Dershowitz once said in a talk that I was attending, there's a fine line between paranoia and caution.

You know, I don't care how people label me.

My work adheres to the very highest standards of scientific integrity.

It always

The monitoring systems I've built are rock solid when it comes to methodology and results.

I know I'm doing things right.

So whatever names people throw at me, it's irrelevant.

I'm trying to get to the truth of the matter.

When we have massive amounts of data that have been preserved, which are normally lost forever, because what we're preserving are ephemeral experiences.

That's key.

That phrase, which is used internally at Google, is key.

Define it.

An ephemeral experience is something like generating search results.

You type in a term, search results appear.

They're generated on the fly

just for you.

And then you click and they're gone and they're gone forever.

So it's a

short-lived experience

that

is generated for you uniquely disappears and there's no way you can go back in time and recreate it.

And ephemeral experiences, that's what my monitoring systems have been able to capture.

That's never been done before.

And that is where we can get a handle on these tech companies.

And I believe that setting up big,

you know, well-crafted monitoring systems is critical, not just to

try to guarantee a free and fair election in 2020.

I think these systems are our protection against the misuse of technologies moving forward into the decades that follow.

I mean, I think this is how we protect humankind from technology is with monitoring systems.

Isn't

why isn't DARPA?

Why isn't this to protect and

to preserve the Constitution of the United States

and its people's freedom.

Why isn't the government backing this?

Why could I get money for turtle tunnel research, but not this?

Glenn, I have to say, in all honesty, I've been wondering that myself.

One of my contacts in Washington says, well, maybe they are doing it and you just don't know.

I mean, that could be.

What was the phrase you said?

If you can think it.

What was that?

Because my,

you know, the CIA helped fund Google.

The NSA loves this kind of information.

The Google employees, strangely, for some reason, just, you know, had a day strike where they all marched in front and said, Google, you have to stop giving information to ICE.

Well, wait.

When did that start?

What do you mean give information to ICE?

What information are they giving and who are they giving it to and how much are they giving?

My fear is that those two are two peas in a pod, that they are

feasting on each other for protection, both sides.

Well, Google works very closely with government agencies.

So one answer I could give to your question is, I think for this first large-scale monitoring system, I think we probably should try to do it independent of government.

I just think that

these systems need to exist around the world.

I think probably they should be independent of government.

They should be reporting possibly to government agencies as appropriate, or to the media as appropriate, or to the Federal Election Commission as appropriate.

But I think our best protection is to have independent

organizations.

They're basically nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations that exist for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to protect humanity, protect democracy, protect the free and fair election by looking over people's shoulders

and seeing what these companies are

showing us.

What are they telling us

over these home assistants like Alexa or Google Home?

What are they saying?

What kinds of answers are they giving?

That's one of the things we're going to monitor.

And we're going to tabulate those data and we're going to analyze them as fast as we can using artificial intelligence.

You see, we're talking about tech.

Tech is the problem.

How do you fight tech?

You fight tech with tech.

That's how you do it.

Tech

can keep up with tech.

Laws and regulations, in my opinion, cannot.

No.

They move way too slowly, and then you get into all the partisans.

I talked to people on the National Security Council at one point,

and we all sat down.

I said, I just, I don't want to talk to you about some future tech that's coming.

And they looked at each other and said, Wow, we're going to have to work with Congress.

We're going to have to, I mean, should we should maybe they start talking among themselves.

Maybe we should look into this law and this law.

And I said,

by the time you guys figure it out, it's already over.

It's over.

They're on to something else.

So

isn't this kind of what

Stephen Hawking was talking about, the end of Homo sapien?

Not meaning that we're all going to, that

there won't be people that necessarily look like us, but we will have to augment or we're never going to be able to keep up with tech.

Hawking was one of a number of people, Elon Musk is another,

who've been warning about

the dangers of new technologies,

various kinds of threats that they pose to the human race.

So I'm not taking on that whole gamut, no,

but I'm saying, look,

I've been doing some very rigorous scientific research for a long time.

It shows without any doubt the power that these companies have.

to manipulate people without their knowing and without leaving a paper trail.

Again, ephemeral experiences.

That's that's the key here.

And for someone maybe who just tuned in, let me just repeat what I said earlier.

That phrase, ephemeral experiences, that actually comes from a memo that was leaked to the Wall Street Journal last year from Google.

They know the power of ephemeral experiences to influence people.

So, you know, that's what I've stumbled onto.

I've stumbled onto that.

I've analyzed it.

I've quantified it.

I'm pretty sure I know how we can protect ourselves from it, from that kind of manipulation.

And so

that's my focus.

Now,

maybe we'll all be taken over by robots.

And in fact, this will all be for nothing.

But

at least in the short term, I'm trying to protect the integrity of the free and fair election in 2020.

Now, I have friends and family members who say,

but that means you're helping Donald Trump.

No, you're helping the truth.

Okay, I have no idea.

Who cares?

Okay, just for the record,

for the record, first of all, first and foremost, I am not suicidal.

Okay, got to get that on the record.

Did you hear that, Google?

Okay, I am not suicidal.

And secondly, I am not a Trump supporter.

He stopped for a second.

Yeah.

I know you said it jokingly.

Yeah.

But you have to think those things, at least in

scary moments of your life.

Like, I should be, you know, when I first started taking on George Soros, I couldn't imagine anyone would try to do that.

But there were times where I like, I want everybody to know George Soros and I are at odds with each other.

I mean, do you have those moments of

let's let's put it this way:

I had one, I'm not going to identify him, but one of the

one of the people who's highest in our country in law enforcement

came up to me at one point after I gave a talk and said,

and there was no smile, not a trace of a smile, unfortunately.

He said, you know, I think in the next few months, you're going to probably die in an accident.

He said, and just keep in mind that people die in accidents every day.

And then he walked away.

Oh, my gosh.

So,

you know,

do such thoughts pop into my head?

Well, sort of, now and then.

The latest whistleblower from Google, Zach Voorhees,

he was, until he finally launched his documents out into the world,

he was very much afraid for his life, very much afraid for his life.

And Google sent police to his home and sent a SWAT team.

And

so

anything's possible.

But I...

I know what I am.

I'm a researcher.

I'm very, very good at what I do.

I'm going to stay focused on doing the research, doing what I do well, and

analyzing my findings, reporting my findings.

I'm going to do this

whether it helps Trump or not.

I just don't think that's an issue that we should...

Jefferson said,

in the end, you have to trust the American people.

They will make a mistake, but in the end, they'll figure it out and they'll correct that mistake.

It's not for us to decide.

To me, that is the problem with the early 20th century progressive.

I know better.

Who are you to say you know better?

Let people figure it out.

People will figure it out, and we're going to make mistakes, but people have to make the choice.

Not an algorithm, not a company, not a dictator.

Well,

that's, again, where I'm digging in because

if we have no monitoring system in place, I mean, let's just talk about that possibility.

If there is no monitoring system in place, whether it's mine or DARPA's or whoever, if there's no monitoring system, no one turns the switch and turns the system on so that we can look over people's shoulders and see what these companies are showing them and preserve those ephemeral experiences.

If we have no such system in place in 2020,

we will have absolutely no idea why whoever won the presidency won the presidency.

We won't have a clue.

And I can tell you this without any doubt: millions of votes will have been shifted by big tech companies without our understanding what happened and without us being able to go back in time and figure it out.

Are we living or about to live in the Matrix, but a different kind, where we're not in pods,

but we're living in

a controlled world anyway?

My impression

in The Matrix series of movies was that

people did make real choices, and those choices had consequences.

Maybe I'm just

fantasizing here, but that was my impression.

Certainly, the illusion of free choice existed in the Matrix.

Was it all just an illusion?

I don't know.

I don't think the Matrix series really weighed in on that point.

But we are definitely at a point in time in which,

as

this British economist said long ago, in which

an unseen dictatorship is possible within the trappings of democracy.

We're definitely at that point in time right now where an unseen dictatorship is indeed possible.

I think to some extent it's already in place.

I think to some extent democracy, as we originally conceived of it, is an illusion.

And to some extent,

free will right now

is also an illusion.

We're being

nudged, but

not just in the sense that Professor Thaler outlined so brilliantly, but we're actually being pushed and shoved

by forces that in some sense are all subliminal.

I mean, you cannot see bias in search results.

You can't.

Yeah, you can't.

Like, I remember when I was a kid

and there was this big thing about subliminal editing.

And you could slow the tape or the film down, and you could go, that frame right there.

This doesn't have the film.

You can't look at the frame.

It's gone.

Well, normally it's gone.

In 2016, I preserved 13,207

election-related searches and was able to capture that, capture the web pages,

in a sense, slow things down so we could go back and analyze it.

2018, I

preserved more than twice that information.

2020, I want to be able to preserve millions of searches.

And what were the results in 16 and 18?

In 16 and 18, both times, I found very, very strong

pro-liberal bias in all 10 search positions on the first page of Google search results, but not on Bing or Yahoo.

So that's important.

The other thing that's important is the statistics.

So we're not going to do a statistics course here, but let me just tell you that the results,

our results were significant not at the 0.05 level, which is a kind of generous cutoff that's often used in research, but at the 0.001 level, meaning the chances that we got our results by chance alone were less than one in a thousand.

Wow.

I'm kind of at this place to where

I kind of found myself

when

I heard about ISIS taking slaves.

And

I thought, what am I doing with my life?

I mean,

how do we even help?

Where's the government on this?

And then I realized, you know what, we don't need the government to do those things.

That's up for us to do.

And

we raised about $26 million

and saved about 30,000 people, moved them out of the area, rescued some slaves.

And I kind of find myself in

that same thing with you.

Would you write a compelling letter to my colleagues?

And I'd like to send it out to every broadcaster and

every podcaster that I know.

And I'd like to see if we can coordinate a broadcast podcast day, week, whatever it is, because I think the American people

Our footprint is 20 or 30 million dollars, or 30 million people in a month.

We can hit 50 million pretty easily in a week if we would work together and if everybody gave a dollar and some people gave ten dollars we could hit that quickly would you be willing to write that letter that i could send out if you twist my arm sure

i think you are an extraordinarily brave man um

i know a little bit of what you have faced um

and the temptation and probably the conversations with your family and your wife.

Honey, is it really worth this?

And

the answer with you is yes.

And I am deeply grateful.

And my children will be deeply grateful for your research and what you have had the courage to stand and say.

Thank you.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.